The American Healthcare system fully disagrees with your statement, as they actively exploit non-profit status to avoid taxes and squeeze any "profits" into bonuses for the people at the top. They aren't even the only industry doing this, but it all boils down to a piss poor lack of regulation and enforcement that really lets companies exploit non-profit structures.

They banned journalists? Who?

And I didn't know about the redirects and tracking either. They are doing that without ads?

They may fail but we better not be bailing them out!

TIL my comment is the top comment.

But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.

Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:

Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative ... 'Relay', that all 'federated' users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the 'AppView', ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model... every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with... and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being 'distributed'.

Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the 'Relay' is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations...

... but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.

Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?

Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.

If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.

If you just see ActivityPub as 'normal social media that can talk to other servers'... you don't get it.

1. There's no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.

2. Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more 'small d' democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.

At some point, hopefully, the users will shape the social media platforms instead of the other way around.

That goon has his DNA all over bluesky, and he has a long history with elon. Cling to semantics if you need to, but the spirit of what I said was true. If they could get away with the optics of dorsey heading bluesky in that "exodus" moment, they would have. But all knew that would leave a bad taste in the public's mouth and slow/stall adoption, so they had the charade they presented.

Yeah, like... I think I agree with most of that, but I really want any of that to represent me.